


Vef-TARDIS

by Linedragon (Sameshima_Shuzumi)



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: (oh my god they were roommates), Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Bisexual Female Character, Curtain Fic, F/F, Femslash, IN SPACE!, Immortals in Space, Lesbians in Space, Post-Episode: s09e12 Hell Bent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2020-01-02
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:17:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22062367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sameshima_Shuzumi/pseuds/Linedragon
Summary: Clara and Me settle in.(mentions of past f+m)
Relationships: Ashildr | Lady Me/Clara Oswin Oswald
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	Vef-TARDIS

**Author's Note:**

> author fell asleep in previous years' marathons, did not realize there was canon lesbian tardis ! ! ! excite !  
beg pardon in advance — author is rusty at wlw fic  
also i am not allowing them to live in a diner, f f s  
vef in icelandic signals weaving. vefjar-stofa is the weaving room that was traditionally (and we're talking pre-christian) women-only [a sad nod to the times, do be wary of dog-whistles if you go digging online]. discussion of child conception, some of dubious consent. character is _SPOILERS_ in a near-death state, and also umbrella immortal warnings. britpick reminder: panto = pantomime (uniquely uk), dungarees are overalls. and a few food mentions.  
mood: sick as a wet puppy. unauthorized distribution and duplication prohibited.  
eta: end of month minor edits

They're both clever enough to know learning to compromise is a must. Headstrong girls might be a pub booth trope but it's more the necessities of traveling in close quarters. Sure, they have all of time and space at their fingertips. Their control room is still a plain white box. Finite number of walls. 

Their first agreement is also their first compromise. In retrospect. Most matters within a time machine are — in retrospect, that is. Me has been put off collecting things for some millennia now; even her journals have been scanned into a memory crystal shaped like a child's top. Clara can and has traveled light, but she has a period-typical affinity for stuff. Implanted technology's other people's cuppa, not hers, so she still instinctively grabs for her smartphone. They can sense this of each other, more in a sense of long acquaintance and less academically, therefore it's no suprise they pounce on the obvious.

Can't start a war over a trip to IKEA. Walls it is. 

"There's no place to hang anything," Clara opines. "Not if you count the spots for tea cups. Then again that hasn't changed. Won't change. Got into a five galaxy row over doormats, I mean kids can be grotty little snots on a good day, was it too much to ask to keep the foyer clear?"

"For your motorbike?" Me says mildly. For her. 

"Yes of course! It's a spaceship from the future, why deal with oil spots?" 

In that moment, Clara felt an uncharacteristic quailing, looking on... Ashildr. She couldn't shake the name in her head, open-minded and supportive as she was (and of name changes in particular). First impressions, she supposed. And that initial incarnation was superimposed on the old, old eyes of the Lady Me regarding Clara with open amusement. Well. Clara had just removed herself from her best friend's life and was essentially in the penultimate age of her own. It might explain why she'd shoved foot in mouth by mentioning both children and the Doctor in the same breath. She was understandably rattled. Second lifetime to Me's countless ones. (Technically?) 

Been there, done that, come on kids, who's keeping score. So—chin up—Clara returned the smile.

*

Their first go at it produced bedrooms. This TARDIS wasn't designed to be redesigned, which called for a swing by a dying black hole to top up radiation, and there were a couple of false starts when the chameleon circuit mixed up the interior with the exterior, till they finally managed walls and beds against those walls.

For their first couple of jaunts, their time machine was mostly bedroom. Beds were quite tricky when they had to be ergonomic in the occasion of space turbulence (also known as broken dampeners, and taking fire), cat naps, and sudden drafts; and psychically shielded to boot. Doors were apparently quite the endeavor, and were left off. They made little comments on how to improve each other's spaces. It was surprisingly nonjudgmental. Clara could see how Me needed a defensible space. Soldiers, she thought with a pang. Or, more accurately, a history of walking about armed. In turn, without a trace of mockery Me worked out how to set up Clara's wardrobe. Clara didn't think herself a fashion plate, but from rotating through outfits for school to grabbing a costume to blend into post-Renaissance aristocracy, her 21st century habits had stuck. 

The single bathroom was situated between them, to start. Not being human, the Doctor tended to back-burner the essentials. Worse yet, mix them up; mistaking the bidet for a drinking fountain was surely written into all-timespace notoriety. This one certainly smelled better. Boys, honestly. Double sinks, of course: one side populated by little vials and hair ornaments from a dozen galaxies, the other cluttered with items from MAC and Space NK, with bottles of nail lacquers in the neutral zone between. (Look, alien invasions were stressful, sometimes it helped to face them down giving good snaps.) Clara actually sold her on the sonic tooth blaster, once they figured out the flavor dial. Nothing like a gust of peppermint to get one up in the morning. Me insisted on a low-gravity shower that was like a whirlwind of tiny loofahs, and more importantly, gorgeously perfect at scrubbing off adhesive sand. 

Clara had a bit of a hairy moment when she lost her balance crossing the gravity gradient. A second later she was bow-legged and half off her feet with Me snagging her by the armpits. If not for the towels wrapped around her? Very naked. And sopping wet. 

"You dropped your earring," Clara observed. For a girl without a heartbeat, it certainly felt like she was blushing. 

Before Me could answer, the dryers kicked in. Which were also positioned for three dimensions. 

They started giggling and couldn't stop. Clara decided not to be embarrassed. 

Me retrieved her earring while Clara sorted out her towel situation. Me was leaning into the mirror. "Guess it could use more calibration." 

They got a bath mat.

*

Traveling with Me was markedly different from dropping in on the Doctor. It wasn't that Me didn't go looking for trouble. Turn her back, and she might be running a planet's underground by tea time. She was definitely smuggling things with their TARDIS. Wholesale, though, seller-to-buyer, uninterested in taking a cut of profit she didn't need. 

Clara knew full well she could take care of herself. But, as she gazed out on the solar winds sparking up in the gravitational eddies of triplet moons, Clara reflected that it wasn't the difference. It was the lack of ... reputation. 

Humans seemed quite unremarkable sometimes, outside of the Doctor's interest. Clara didn't dwell on comparative studies; that way lay supremacist inklings. The Doctor tended to drift towards the _interesting_ kinds. Meanwhle, as the pair of them bounced through a more mundane survey, human beings began to stand out as fairly unexceptional. They weren't the only warrior race. They weren't the only ones with stupid governments or dying suns or marine life that could think but not talk. Clara was no anthropologist; out the door they simply blended in, an ordinary alien race from an ordinary backwater in an ordinary spiral galaxy. Not only because Me endeavored to fade into the background. It was a bit of a comfort. If they got into trouble, it was because they'd done something that day-cycle, and not because their former selves had insulted an ambassador five lifetimes ago. 

(The very mention of him, the very shadow of him, could put a world leader on the back foot. Not Me.) 

And it was comfortable, Clara discovered — being ordinary. They could be tourists, for real. The sort the Doctor always promised they'd be, before he went back on it and got to meddling. It made Clara smile, still. But they'd never been tourists. 

It was rather like retiring. Odd, that. Clara felt too young to be a pensioner. Though in fairness she was also too young to die. 

Retirement it was. That settled her nerves more than anything.

Me seemed to notice. She seemed pleased.

*

Clara got herself a chalkboard of sorts. It was surfaced on an obelisk which Me swore was benign, and which held up the back wall opposite the exterior door. She blacked her hands coating it with paint, hunting all over for the elbow-length gloves so she could dip all the way into the bucket of nanobot-buffers and scrub the surface smooth. Me even held the ladder when she came to the topper because Clara wasn't going to recreate her childhood panto of _Peter Pan_ and also was not going to mention how discomfited she was at messing with the gravity settings. All without an answering complaint. Clara would've said she was staring if she weren't wearing dungarees. 

The TARDIS did complain of the toxic fumes, unfailingly cleansing the air. Clara apologized with fiddly wire untangling. She'd never treated the Doctor's TARDIS as a person before, though she was vaguely aware she'd inhabited a physical form, largely because it had been the Doctor's TARDIS. His own pet project (though perhaps it was the other way around, and he was the pet project of the TARDIS.) This time, Clara began to feel for the personality of the ship. Well, not precisely. It was closer to looking on a figurehead on a ship's bow and picturing the whole ship, a synecdoche of identity. 

She was well aware this came from styling this TARDIS from the ground up. Less like a space hotel. A... home, perhaps. 

The obelisk filled up with lists. 

Places to go. People to meet. And essentials to human life. Music. Groceries. Construction plans. 

Hieroglyphics of their lives, done up in temporary chalk. (Such was the life of a time traveller.)

Concurrently, Me began to feather her nest. Sumptuous blankets which emitted their own heat, gauzy curtains for the walls where she kept her weapons. Clara followed suit, more cautiously for one reason or another. A shelf she'd assumed had been built for shoes was in fact the exact height for a bookshelf. She took the hint, got a couple of books, and even some scrolls, with a proper automatic scroller that tinkled gently as it turned, and let the TARDIS translate languages from planets yet to be formed. Which was funny because back on Earth she'd gotten on board with screen readers, partly an effect of being on speaking terms with several librarians, and partly due to a hectic life in her tiny apartment. Coal Hill hadn't turned over from dead-tree textbooks, at the time of her leaving (at the time of her death). She recognized the fit of nostalgia for what it was. Ran her palm along hand-bound book spines. 

Me, now, she began to add chairs. Which wasn't the sort of furnishing usually found on a spaceship. Steady as their TARDIS was, stuff happened. Dampeners failed, asteroids showered. Except Me had quantum anchored nearly every object in the TARDIS: all the pillboxes and candleholders and bits of chalk and the cookie cutters. The mugs. Why did they have so many mugs? It was the mug cake, of course, cooked by the radiation of a star in decline, they had discovered a powdered sugar that didn't get into everything and they'd sit on their couch and spoon it onto their personal cake. In their spaceship. Surrounded by rattan chairs and plush armchairs and leviating poufs. And the one footstool which was actually a stunning grenade, Me had had that one custom made. They could have seating configurations. It was madness. 

Clara lay awake in the dim cycle, trying not to make a mental tally of her days, and thought of Me picking up every object in their cozy space and waving her control bracer at it. 

The twist of her wrist. The quirk of her careful smile.

*

They disagree on destinations, and on the nature of their departures, but the first true loggerhead is on the matter of Clara's past life. 

"I'm saying it's got to be a paradox!" Clara bounces on her hammock. Me is significantly less tense on the opposite hammock, but she isn't smiling. "We saw him, we met him, and he looked exactly like Danny. Spitting image."

The name only partially chokes her up now. She doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about the afterlife, being that she is _in_ one, but in the moments before waking, half-lucid, she feels sure they were due to meet again. That undiscovered country indeed.

"You didn't do a DNA scan. The foremothers' gene is easy, even in your era."

Clara goggles. "Mitochondrial DNA. No, I didn't personally — are you proposing we pop over to check the sonic to download the results?"

_His_ sonic screwdriver. Funny that she's reluctant to call him by his moniker.

Me has frozen up like a statue. The hammock continues swinging, as programmed. "What are you planning to do about it?"

"I dunno," Clara admits. "It just seems untidy." She is, she realizes, used to him — _the Doctor_ tidying every last loose end. "I'm sorry," she tells Me. "It occurred to me, at the bubble nursery: there's more than one way to have..." She trails off.

Me's eyelashes sweep down, hooded. "—to have babies."

"I am so sorry," says Clara. Foot in her mouth. It was different, somehow, to confront the Doctor's nonchalance over losing generations of his entire family, than to talk to a fellow woman who would have been defined by her womb. Moreso than Clara, though it isn't a race. 

Me charges on like she hasn't heard. "It couldn't be you. And it would have to be conceived outside the TARDIS, unless you're going for something not entirely human."

Clara feels an awkward rush of relief that she wouldn't be the one pregnant. Where had that come from? She loves kids. 

"You'd have to find someone utterly trustworthy," Me continues. 

"I suppose that'd be a bit of work," Clara ponders. She tucks her knees under, and crosses them, slumping in. "Had to sit in on personnel hiring once, tedious as drying cement. Thought of nicking a scanner just for the boredom, see if we had a secret infiltration. I mean, other than the one we had... What?"

Me is looking at her oddly. "Nothing," she says idly. She's uncoiled, as well. "It would," she says after a moment. "Take some time."

*

For what must be a year in her personal, subjective clock, Clara remains intimidated by Me. She is dust on the chalkboard — a temporary list. 

The girl who lives forever. The girl with less than a moment to live.

They are equal companions; Clara did pick up how to drive the TARDIS, and can even do a spot repair, under fire, too. But it's Me who alters the dimensions of their home. It's Me who orchestrates the revolving walls, who raises the garden trellises, who digs into the engine like she built this TARDIS from a kit. 

A sleeve's swipe away from her ending. Clara exists at the Lady Me's whim. Her life is a courtesy granted by her accidental flatmate. Who is very much older than she. Oh, she doesn't really think she's got to keep Me entertained, like a reverse babysitting job that's flagged for double the usual rate.

Besides, she wants for nothing. Another dimension is folded up for a kitchen, well, it's not gourmet and it's not wood-burning, it's just bigger than anything she's ever cooked in. Clara tends to cook fresh, once she figures out that what functions as a refrigerator is actually freezing each foodstuff in time. She bakes more, turning out batches of cookies for their set of crumbless dishes, and quiches and soufflés for when it's a day for a tundra, or sailing on methane lakes.

Despite it being a sort-of separate pocket dimension, the aroma of cooked food does pervade the common area all the time. Me doesn't explain herself. Clara really isn't an apron-and-whisk sort of girl, beyond the usual cookery show bookmarks, they both know it, so that this is _sentiment_ seems fairly obvious. 

She thinks about Me picking up every object in this kitchen, every apple and peach, and one by one, freezing them in a time-lock. Preserving.

*

"You can't actually stop me from doing it," Me tells her one day. They're outside on a rooftop made of living glass, watching the sunset as the parapets literally call to each other. 

Clara is halfway through the tub of macarons. "Do what?"

"Settling your paradox," Me says blithely.

Clara stares and stares. "You going to ask Danny yourself?"

"I don't have to ask him either." Me leans back. Haughty as a queen. Clara's met queens, she recognizes the look.

"Nice to know our opinion matters." She stares some more. Crumbs are getting away from her. "Hang on, are you seriously going to wait until—" 

After she's gone. 

Me raises a shoulder. "I'll tell them about you. What's one more lifetime? If I hadn't written it down, I'd have forgotten their names entirely."

Clara's afraid to ask if she'd carry them herself, the old-fashioned way. The thought gives her a jolt. But it's a big universe; a surrogate doesn't have to be alive, much less sentient, for a safe, healthy birth. 

The point is taken, anyway. Unless Clara manages to snag herself into another ghost-state, there is no way of stopping Me after the fact. She may as well be a goddess. 

Clara finds herself unbothered by that; it's the same for anybody else who outlives her. Time streams in one direction, and not everybody is a time traveller. 

Still. "....why?"

This time Me turns all the way over to face her. "You don't have to save him."

With that, Clara's ire is up. "What, he's not good enough to save? _I_ remember him."

If anything, Me looks amused. "_You_ don't have to save him," she emphasizes. "Him, or anyone else."

It sounds almost gentle. Caught off-balance, Clara tucks strands of hair behind her ear. 

_You don't have to save the Doctor anymore._ More surprising is that the thought doesn't fill her with anxiety. It's true, isn't it? This is her second chance. 

"Thank you," she ventures. 

"It'd be something to do," Me murmurs to herself. The parapets trill, echoing. "Looking in on your descendants."

They contemplate the vast expanse.

*

It's when they start constructing proper guest rooms that Clara finally twigs to it. 

Because they have _doors_. 

They don't lock, of course, because Me retains her paranoia, but the point, the dastardly elusive point is: Me could make doors a long time ago. 

Clara didn't notice it in their open-concept TARDIS — which, damningly, resembles a cozy multi-level flat — with a layout that doesn't need doors. Their bathroom is blocked off by a series of wavy, overlapping walls. Not that it matters when it's just the two of them, they've grown casual with their nudity, Clara in her bra popping back to her room to fetch a different blouse, Me sauntering out of the shower to demand she plait her hair, oh. 

"Oh, I am thick," Clara declares. She stands in front of their living quarters, arms akimbo, and shakes her head.

Their bedrooms have no doors. 

Yes, their beds are offset from the entrance, but it's been an Earth year or so and they've been traipsing back and forth between their rooms, and why didn't she figure this out sooner? Me, who's been hurt, who's been ground down by time, who is going to forget Clara's name — this is her idea of an _invitation_.

She was probably waiting on Clara to process her grief! And though the mere mention of it still gives her a pang, Clara squares her shoulders and marches to the kitchen. 

She grabs their biggest three-dimensional mug and makes a spicy hot cocoa. Does she know the recipe by heart? Yes, she does. Is she going to be the most domestic time traveller ever? Yes, she is. 

Marching to Me's room, the splash of deep red, purple, and browns, muffled with cloths woven so finely that they need a nanometer to count its threads, Clara... pauses at the threshold.

"May I come in?"

Me looks up from her indolent sprawl on the bed that is _exactly the size to fit the two of them_, oh my god how did she miss that?, and reads her like a book. 

She says, "I thought you'd never ask."

*

Clara should have done this a long time ago. 

No one touches Me. 

So when she winds her arms around her, it's the very moment pantheons fall. 

*

They're in a nude mostly-pretzel in Me's luxurious nest. At this rate, Clara's room is going to become her walk-in closet; it may need a door. 

Me's lowered the gravity so they can pillow without pinching much. Strands of hair float free and tangle and sometimes crackle with static electricity. 

"I ran into the Gothic novelist in the 20th," Me says. "The one who never saw a cent when they made his stories into films? Not Mary, she was keen." 

"She was," Clara agrees.

"Mm, no, must have been 19th. Skirts."

"Ah."

"He was a prat."

"You think they're all prats." 

"Am I wrong?" 

Clara kisses that raised eyebrow. "Mostly not."

Me pinches her with deliberation. "I got into his manuscript. Rubbish, of course, nothing like the actual bloodsuckers of Carpathia."

"They the ones with the...?"

"No, those are aliens." It's nice to talk to one's own kind, when all's said and done. "He was a prat, but he was... full of passion. The image stuck with me. I started to think of the Doctor as my vampire—"

"Your sire!" Clara nearly screeches. "Oh my god!"

"It's apt, isn't it?"

"Metaphorically." Clara is still giggling.

"Yours too."

Clara grabs the nearest pillow and hides under that. 

Spitting out tassels, Me engages in an altogether unfair tickle skirmish. 

"You're obsessed," Clara tells her. "Touché, I'll save you the trouble."

"You're welcome," says Me cheekily. She strokes the line of Clara's shoulder. "We were towed along his line, us two. For ages I would dig into my past and it was..." Her hand rises to their vaulted ceiling and it's a child's hand. Oh, not a child in her culture, long left behind; but they are so old all the mature adults look like children. "It was turning over dead leaves. For a while I could feel the shape of them, the veins that were the last to rot, then one day the dry forest floor would turn up damp dirt. It would smell awful, composted into nothing, and yet. Familiar."

Clara squeezes her, all the layers and every hidden solidity not shown to her. "You knew you'd been there."

"As a bloodhound tracks a corpse," says Me drily, but she gentles her hold, brushes dry lips on her neck: an apology. "But I did promise him. I broke that promise, though after all this time I feel that's to be expected: an immortal making a mistake."

Heady with kisses, Clara asks, "What promise?"

"To watch over his companions." Me's mouth curls into a smile. "I made it a game."

"Less boring."

"Quite." Clara's not a pouter, normally; she pouts now and her Lady Me kisses it. "So I do have you at an advantage. I know all about you."

"I knew that."

"I mean I studied you," Me insists. "A glance every now and again, accumulating over the years. Until I realized," she says, her hand capturing Clara's, and weaving their fingers together. "You were familiar. Dig and dig some more, and I had nothing to show for it. Observe my fellow traveler... Perhaps I would forget myself. You were too memorable to forget."

Clara is taken aback. Me is kissing her knuckles, one by one. Taking great care. Her eyes are old and huge perched on the round of her shoulder.

"I can't blush," Clara tells her. "You can't prove anything!"

Me outright guffaws. She sidles up, hands busy. "I'll simply have to try harder." And moves down without losing her smile.

*

Clara is too much like the Doctor. Me is too resentful of him. It shouldn't work. They compromise.

Until Clara finds Me deep in the guts of their TARDIS. She asks what she's up to.

Me can lie by omission the way the Doctor can lie with his facts. She doesn't, this time. Compromise. 

"I'm smoothing out the dimensional brakes. For a quieter landing."

Abruptly it hits Clara. She sets down her stick of chalk. 

Me is changing the sound. The TARDIS sound. The Doctor was fond of slapdash customisations, and less of improving what had been granted him by the luck of the draw (not luck, Clara thinks wryly). It was a practical thought to sound and look and seem as little like the Doctor as possible. 

Clara knew her better than that. 

"Don't you do things out of guilt!" Clara has hands on hips, like she's someone's mum. 

Slowly, Me glances up. In that instant, instead of wiring, Clara sees the puppet strings of the marvelous creations she used to make, the stories she used to weave from thin air. Something sparks. "Doesn't it cause you pain?"

"Yes, but," comes the unintended confession. "You don't have to... to make it up to me."

Me's mouth stiffens.

Some memories Clara wishes would let her go. Let them both go. 

Clara does something she should've done ages ago. 

The funny thing about being watched is you might be watched back. 

She kneels before Me, breasts level with her scuffed knees. "Stay with me."

"I am," comes the automatic riposte. She doesn't look away. 

"Stay," says Clara, "until you tire of me. Until you're yawning instead of laughing. Until you're weeping instead of smiling. Until," she crowds her in, captures her familiar hands. "You'd rather claw your eyes out than stand another second—"

Me flinches, and Clara hangs on. She's gotten good at that. "I recognize you. Time may push changes on us but I do see you, no matter how still you stand, or how you hold your breath for the next damned thing to turn up. Because should that ever happen—"

"_If_," corrects Me, and Clara feels everything light up. 

"—I couldn't stand it either." Clara wets her lips. "You made a promise to me. I'm returning the favor. I promise. No guilt. No regrets."

_Second chances._

Me sighs. Still clasping hands, she touches Clara's cheek. "We still have to adjust this. The machinery's not supposed to grind like that. And," she smirks.

Whole universes conditioned to that sound, fine, all right, she was there too. "I thought they'd shed all their tentacles when they caught us materializing!" 

"I almost want to ask."

They laugh.

They don't let go.

*

They explore the Glasmir Mountains. They picnic in the Saharan savanna. From low orbit they hack into Clara's defunct networking page, and change her relationship profile: _it's complicated_. Timed precisely to fend off the Doctor's native curiosity... and perhaps one day Rigsy will find it, and hope. They beachcomb on Zastros 8, and register a song in Ugarit, and one smuggling ring later end up with two boxes of expandable scrolls. Clara writes a cookbook that no-one will print. Me takes up, or re-takes up sketching. They expand the soaking tub.

A new chalk drawing appears at each breakfast.

They stay.


End file.
